Field devices for industrial facilities are generally connected to a fieldbus in order to be able to receive commands from a control system via a fieldbus protocol. In order to facilitate the connection to the control system, the manufacturer of the field device often also delivers an electronic device description that contains available commands and parameters, and optionally also specifications for the domain logic and/or for the user interface.
Some fieldbus protocols already contain more or less extensive cross-device and cross-manufacturer standardization. The fieldbus protocol standard can thus specify a set of commands, for example, which commands must necessarily be supported by a standards-compliant field device. The standard may also define a further set of commands, the function and syntax of which are fixed, but which do not necessarily have to be supported by every standards-compliant field device. A generic device description, by means of which most standards-compliant field devices can be operated, can be formulated from these commands that necessarily must be supported and that are optionally to be supported but that are otherwise unified.
If a generic device description of this kind is used for a field device, or if another device description not originating from the manufacturer of the field device is used, it may be the case that a command that is defined therein and is optionally to be supported is not supported by the field device. The field device responds to a command of this kind with an error message. In an industrial facility comprising a plurality of field devices, irrelevant error messages of this kind accumulate to form a noise level in which the relevant error messages may be lost. This impairs the overview of the status of the field devices in the industrial facility.